Last week, I joined 15,000 or so other cyclists from around the world for a very long bike ride. RAGBRAI®, or the Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, is one of those traditions with which Iowans are well-acquain
ted. We started in Council Bluffs on the west side of the state, and 442 miles and 7 days later ended our ride with a dip of our front tire in the Mississippi in Burlington, Iowa. Describing RAGBRAI in just a few words to someone who has never seen it is quite difficult, but imagine a 60 mile stretch of busy highway traffic in which the cars range from a 1920 Ford to a brand new souped up hybrid and the drivers wear anything from TuTus and feather boas to spandex, and you'll sort-of get the idea.
Unexpectedly, I had the opportunity to cover RAGBRAI for my local newspaper. It was my first real effort in journalism, and it was great fun interviewing dozens of people along the ride. If you're interested in getting more of a feel for the ride, you can read my columns here, and the official RAGBRAI website is here.
When one bikes through dozens of small towns, stays in private homes or churches, and takes part in church fundraisers, one has plenty of opportunities to see and reflect on hospitality. Some churches do hospitality amazingly well, like the folks at a mega-huge non-denominational church in the middle of nowhere we passed on our final day. They had plenty of free food to give away, awesome coffee, teams of people throughout the property in bright neon yellow to answer questions like, "How far is it to the end?" (whether or not they answered that question in a faith-related way, I don't know), and what is often the best gift of all on RAGBRAI--plenty of clean bathrooms. Other churches and families were clearly not very interested in hospitality, closing their doors to the riders and not allowing them to camp overnight on the property. I experienced great hospitality at one home I stayed at, where the family entrusted me with their personal computer until the wee hours of the morning when my laptop failed to fully work so that I could finish writing and filing my newspaper article. Another member of my team stopped by a random house to get directions to the school showers, and the man there said, "Up the stairs, on the right. Towels are in the closet - help yourself!"
The great spiritual writer Henri Nouwen said that a major task of the Christian life is the move from hostility to hospitality. We become more and more hospitable when we respond directly to the people God sends our way, he felt. The biblical word in Greek for hospitality is philoxenia (fil-a-zeen-ee-ah), which literally means "love of strangers." Hospitality is by its very nature a relational task, not one that can be done in isolation.
Hospitality is the continual work of the church, because there will never be a shortage of strangers in our midst. Indeed, it would not be hard to argue that hospitality is among our top, core tasks, for scripture calls us again and again to care for and serve the stranger, the vulnerable one, the homeless person, the guest at the door, the person lacking justice, the cyclist with an empty water bottle. Yet many churches are plagued by xenophobia--fear of strangers, which expresses itself in conscious and unconscious hostility. It's not hard to spot when you're on the "outside," and just a few doses of it are easily enough to turn people off to churches in general.
If hospitality is hard for you (as, frankly, it often is for me), then I have an invitation for you. Come on RAGBRAI with me next year. My team would love to welcome you and have you experience this week of visible hospitality. Contact me for details. And if you're already great at hospitality, engage your congregation in regular conversation about the ministry of hospitality. You just never know, after all, when 15,000 cyclists will roll past your door!